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Managing Blog Comments

Blogs come with their own set of problems. You can expect to have to deal with comment spam, Trackback spam and trolls.

Spam and Trolls

Sadly, blogs aren't free of the universal Internet malady: spam. On blogs, spam takes the form of commercial messages in your comments and Trackback links, and offensive rants from posters called trolls.

Spam comments accumulate when spammers send scripts out to find and post to blogs. Typical subjects include online gambling, mortgage offers and pharmaceutical products. You may also find more unsavory spam as well. For the spammers, the idea isn't to put their ads in front of your readers; the idea is to create links to their Web sites thereby boosting their rankings in search engine results. Since the link is the point, you may also find spam that tries to trick you with a comment like "Nice site." Popular blogs can get hit with hundreds, even thousands, of spam comments in a single day.

Trackbacks are a blog technology that allows another blogger to create a link on your blog to theirs automatically when they write a post that refers to yours. It's intended to be a reader service that allows blog readers to work their way along the path of related posts. Sadly, they are just as susceptible to abuse as comments are. Spammers create a fake Trackback link for the benefit of links to their Web sites and to the detriment of the value of your blog.

Trolls, unlike comment and Trackback spammers, are real people with real things to say. They are called trolls because what they have to say is usually unpleasant, even vicious. They lurk on your blog, reaching out to take a swipe at you as you go about the business of posting. A troll may post a comment that targets you with a personal attack or simply a rant on a subject they are hyperfocused on. They aren’t sending out commercial messages, but their comments are usually just as off-topic and usually offensive as well.

Preventing Spam

Every blog must have a front line defense against spam: Someone who polices comments and Trackbacks and deletes those that shouldn't be on the blog. This is a time-consuming, mind-numbing job, but it's essential if you want your blog to attract readers. There's nothing more off-putting than a spam-ridden blog. Most blog software gives the blogger the ability to get e-mail notification of new comments, so deleting spam can be done on the road or at home (or better yet, by an intern from a university computer lab).

If comment spam is simply out of control, most blog software allows you to turn comments off completely for all your posts or for those that are particularly hard hit. Turning off comments halts your communication with readers, but it can be a good stop-gap measure.

You can also often turn off comments after a certain amount of time has passed so that old posts don't become a breeding ground for spam.

One increasingly popular method of dealing with comment spammers is to require that readers who want to comment register with your blog. Some readers won’t bother with registering, but it's also likely the comment spammers won't either.

A blacklist is the most important tool you can use to prevent spam. Most of the better blog software tools include a blacklist feature that allows you to ban certain IP addresses, e-mail addresses, URLs and registered users. Those you ban are added to the blacklist and those elements can no longer be used in comments.

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